Import Vector Grahpics to Word - Best Format

[Kenny]

Version: v.X
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Power PC

Hi, I've been searching everywhere for CLEAR and definitive answers on what file types to best create for Word to import. It is surprisingly hard to get cold hard facts on this!

So this is what we have:
Simple letterhead header & footer that need to be placed in Word templates. Files are created in Illustrator (CS3), and are simple logo & text, though all text has been converted to curves, and all colors are RGB.

This is what I've tried:
- EPS: Seems most obvious, and if you have a postscript printer everything goes pretty well. Screen graphics look poor, though, as does printing to non-postscript printer.

- EMF: Created from Illustrator. Printed really poorly (almost like a smudged stamp).

- WMF: Definitely lower quality than EPS.

- PNG: Created 600dpi PNG file to avoid postscript issues. PNG files were small (less than 150k each). But after embedding PNG and saving Word file, it balloons to over 5Mb! Linking files is probably too dangerous for this client.

??? What is the BEST and most solid format to use for vector files coming into Word???

I also learned that Word has changed their EPS import filters between Word 2003 & 2007, so that confuses things even more. We have 2003.

THANKS!!!

 

[CyberTaz]

If you're continuing to use v.X you're best bet is EPS, but it sounds like
you might want to kick up the Preview image format level when you save the
file from Illy. Choose 8-bit TIFF & always use the Insert> Picture method
rather than pasting.

Alternatively, PDF works well but I'm not sure v.X will allow inserting PDF
either as Picture or Object. You might give it a shot.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[mdh]

Think your assessment is just about right.
The trick with WMF/EMF is to generate them much bigger, and then to
rescale them once you place them in Word.
This will improve the quality.

The main issue that I've had is that I get strange artifacts when
printing after I outline fonts in Illustrator before the WMF or EMF
export. Annoying.

I don't think it is an accident that Illustrator's "Export for
Microsoft Office" command exports to PNG.
This is what I now use for general corporate documentation, where
people don't really care about illustration quality.

When I care about the quality, I use InDesign or LaTeX, rather than
Word.


Matt

 

[John McGhie]

The only clear and definitive answer we could give you is that there is no
clear and definitive answer.

Adobe and Microsoft are playing a silly game of "our way or the highway"
that leads to huge problems.

Word v.X needs to come out of the equation, it does not have the ability to
handle any kind of vector graphics properly (it tries to create QuickDraw
things which which work somewhat badly on everything except an old Mac).

WMF should be a lot better, but it depends on how it is made. Illustrator
is determined to create them with a TIFF preview. To keep it small, it's a
VERY low-resolution and it will look like a smudged postage stamp. Sadly,
most flavours of Mac Word are unable to find the "vector" component of the
image and they tend to print the preview (it's a bug...)

I avoid this by making a WMF with a WMF preview, which looks nearly as good
as EPS. But I don't think Adobe allows this (because to do so would enable
Microsoft software to produce high-quality graphics...)

WMF will never be as good as EPS because a WMF is composed of a large number
of short, straight lines. Curves lose quite a bit of resolution as a
result. But most software can handle it.

EMF will look a lot better if it is properly created, because it contains
real curves and it also has a 24-bit colour table. But I suspect Adobe
creates its EMF using a fairly coarse conversion filter, because it doesn't
seem to work that well. Again, the Adobe preview is in TIFF, and old
versions of Mac Word tend to lose the vector information and print the
preview instead (bug...)

EMF is a format you might persist with for cross-platform work, because on
the PC it looks perfect and it does not require a PostScript interpreter on
the printer. But it's important NOT to create a preview with your EMF
image, because if you do, that's what most versions of Mac Word will print
{Sigh...} And some versions of Mac Word can't display the EMF if it doesn't
have a preview {it's a bug...}

EPS should look perfect, but Microsoft software has not been able to get EPS
right on the Mac until Office 2008. Microsoft was trying to make Adobe look
bad...

Matt is quite correct: high-res PNG is safe in any Microsoft application.
But it adds a lot of weight to the document (it's about twice the size of
JPG).

PNG uses 24-bit colour and retains full resolution at the expense of colour.
JPG retains the full colour table and sacrifices resolution to preserve
colour. JPEG consequently works well for photos, PNG works well for stuff
where resolution is important.

Until Microsoft and Adobe stop this silly game, graphics in Microsoft Office
for the Mac will remain a problem.

I just tested the following formats in Word 2008 version 12.1.7 in .docx
format, using Insert>Picture>From file...

EPS with WMF Header
EPS with TIFF Header
WMF with no Header
WMF with WMF Header
EMF with no Header
PNG at 300 dpi

I got excellent results with each one. Some notes:
* EPS really does work properly at last: full resolution curves, proper
line weights, fountain fills work properly, the whole enchilada.
* EPS with a TIFF Header worked just as well! Mac Word 2008 seems to have
solved its issue with printing the header instead of the vector information.
* WMF works really well, but if you include small sharp curves you WILL see
the difference at high magnifications. The graphic I made to test this was
looking for aliasing effects and I found them. But an office worker looking
at a half-page graphic at 100 per cent zoom probably won't see them. Some
of the line weights will change, some of the curves will get a little rough,
and the fountain fills suffer "stepping" at high magnifications. But that's
a limitation of the 8-bit WMF format.
* WMF with no header looks just as good/bad as WMF with a WMF header.
* EMF is twice as good as WMF, nearly the same as EPS. That's a legacy of
EMF's 24-bit colour table and the 32-bit vector numbers: everything will be
a lot more accurate.
* PNG looks good (at 300 dpi it would want to...). I got a colour shift
because I chose a CMYK colour conversion and I was too lazy to go back and
change it. If you wish to succeed with Microsoft applications on a PC,
stick to 24-bit RGB or you will get problems.
* The method you use to insert the graphics makes a difference.
Insert>Picture>From File... Will give the best results. Avoid "Paste" like
the plague, you never know what will actually land in the document!

So: I now have confidence in saying that Microsoft seems to have finally
solved its problems with Word 2008's vector graphics.

However, it is important to work in .docx. Not least because the .docx
format stores the original graphics in their original format! When I opened
up the .docx by unzipping, I found the image in there as a PDF and a PNG
pair for the two EPS versions. The EMF is stored as an EMF. The WMF as a
WMF, and the PNG as a PNG.

Saving in the old .doc format still gives good results in Word 2008 (but
don't bet on it with complex high-res graphics) but the file size blew out
from 380 kb to 800 kb. You need to expect that because the .doc format
would contain down-converted versions of each graphic. This document
contains almost nothing but the test graphics.

Sorry: No good answers...

Hope this helps

Version: v.X
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Power PC

Hi, I've been searching everywhere for CLEAR and definitive answers on what
file types to best create for Word to import. It is surprisingly hard to get
cold hard facts on this!

So this is what we have:
Simple letterhead header & footer that need to be placed in Word templates.
Files are created in Illustrator (CS3), and are simple logo & text, though all
text has been converted to curves, and all colors are RGB.

This is what I've tried:
- EPS: Seems most obvious, and if you have a postscript printer everything
goes pretty well. Screen graphics look poor, though, as does printing to
non-postscript printer.

- EMF: Created from Illustrator. Printed really poorly (almost like a smudged
stamp).

- WMF: Definitely lower quality than EPS.

- PNG: Created 600dpi PNG file to avoid postscript issues. PNG files were
small (less than 150k each). But after embedding PNG and saving Word file, it
balloons to over 5Mb! Linking files is probably too dangerous for this client.

??? What is the BEST and most solid format to use for vector files coming into
Word???

I also learned that Word has changed their EPS import filters between Word
2003 & 2007, so that confuses things even more. We have 2003.

THANKS!!!

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[mdh]

John,
What are you using to create your WMF/EMF graphics?
And how do those work with fonts, cross-platform?

Matt

 

[Kenny]

Wow! Thanks for all the replies everyone!

OK, so I guess I should have let you know that the ultimate ways that these will be used will be on PC's running Word 2003 or Word 2007. We do have a token PC here that has Word 2003 on it, and I had been trying that as well for the importing.

We have Illustrator CS3 on the Mac for creating graphics. But I see limited results from the exporting here.

I have Word v.X on my machine, but someone here may have Word 2008. I just worry about compatibility with the PCs using Word 2003 & 2007.

And my last effort was trying a free trial of Corel Draw to create the graphics. It can open the Illustrator files, and then export a lot of different formats, probably better optimized for a PC I would imagine. This is how I was able to generate an EPS w/ a WMF preview. Illustrator does not offer this, even the PC version.

But I'll also try an EMF created by Corel. The EMF created by Illustrator looked HORRIBLE, but maybe that was more due to how it was imported.

This is WAY more complicated than it needs to be!!!

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Matt:

I normally use CorelDRAW, but I have several other things I also use:
depending on what I am producing. I am not at all graphical ‹ I can't draw
a cheque, let alone a picture; so there's no point in my using high-end
software

For the work I do, fonts just don't matter. In general, "fonts" simply
don't work cross-platform, and I need to get over it

High-end graphics software such as CorelDRAW enable the choice of either
embedding the fonts, or converting them to curves. If I were intending to
convert to curves, I would strike WMF off the list: it doesn't have the
precision needed to do a good job with fonts smaller than about 24 points.

Most fonts these days are restricted so that they won't work if you do embed
them, so I generally don't do that. Fonts embedded in anything other than
EPS/PDF are probably never going to work, anywhere.

That means that for commercial work, either I have to use fonts I know the
target computers have, or I have to arrange for the customer to buy the
fonts. None of my customers have sufficient interest or patience to be
shopping for and installing fonts, so that leaves only "option A".

I often rely on font substitution to deal with the "edge" cases. Font
substitution is very reliable these days, and both Macs and PCs have a
wide-enough range of fonts installed by default that they will get pretty
close. I do ensure that I am using Unicode fonts and UTF-8 encoding:
character-set problems could really shatter one's professional reputation


Modern graphics practice increasingly is moving away from having text in
pictures. So the problem is going away, at least in my practice. I deal
almost entirely in the corporate space, where the customer wants to maintain
their own graphics, and requires them to work wherever they send them.

Consequently, as a rule of thumb I choose only those fonts shipped with
Microsoft Office, and I avoid having text in pictures as far as possible.
After all, the whole point of having a picture is to achieve a
communications goal that text won't do, so filling the picture with text is
sort-of missing the point a little

Yes, I am well aware that there are still requirements that need far greater
precision than I offer. I refer such customers straight off to a graphics
house, and perhaps warn them that they need to entirely abandon any thought
of being involved beyond the "First Draft" stage. If the requirement is for
an eight-colour coffee-table masterpiece with high-end production values,
then the customer has to get used to handing the job over and then staying
out of the way while graphics professionals achieve the result they wanted.

But the vast majority of my output these days never gets anywhere near
paper: it's never printed at all. So I tend to encounter more of the
"cross-platform" kinds of issues and very few of the "precision rendering"
issues. The industry has changed quite a bit since I got into it

I was working at one company where they had a contract graphics artist, who
insisted on including not only call-outs and labels but also captions in his
pictures. He also refused to deliver them in any format other than raster
formats. He was working on a Mac, and claimed he couldn't get vector
graphics to work properly. I sacked him: it was just a scam to ensure that
if we wanted to update any of the pictures, we had to go back to him to have
the work done.

It would be nice if this stuff "just worked", and even nicer if Microsoft
and Adobe would stop their silly games. But they don't, and they won't. I
take the view that the customer is paying my outrageous fees so he doesn't
have to think about any of this: it's my job to "make it work". And these
days, that means cross-platform, too

Cheers

John,
What are you using to create your WMF/EMF graphics?
And how do those work with fonts, cross-platform?

Matt

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Kenny:

Well, these days, it is a LOT simpler than it used to be Matt's
questions about "fonts" are very pertinent

Once you get above the "office graphics" domain, then these jobs really do
require a qualified graphics professional who has spent ten years learning
their craft and does nothing else all day.

Yes, I have used CorelDRAW for years, because one of its key selling points
is that it can read and write almost every graphics format in the known
universe, and that is important in my business: I can't afford to get
stranded with a format I can't work with.

Word v.X simply can't cut it in this game: get rid of it

You would be well advised to consider adopting a RULE of "never convert
ANYTHING" when working with graphics. It's simply not possible to convert
"perfectly" from one graphics format to another: you will always lose or
change "something", because the various formats have different capabilities.

EPS/PDF are the industry standard for high-end graphics. However, the only
applications that handle them well are the high-end graphics applications
that corporate desktops don't have, and are simply not going to be able to
afford. Often, corporate PCs and printers simply don't have enough memory
to do a good job (or even, work at all...) with colour EPS.

But EPS is still my favourite vector format for finished images, because it
doesn't get converted when it goes across platform. Provided, of course,
that the customer doesn't want to edit it themselves. CorelDRAW will edit
EPS, and so will the Adobe apps, but not much else will. And editing them
is a pain, because you lose your grids and guidelines and colour palettes
and what have you on the save to EPS.

In my answer to Matt, I mentioned some of the things I do to ensure that my
work behaves properly cross-platform. Staying away from rare or specialist
fonts will save you a lot of time and money.

There is also a little skill involved in designing graphics so that even if
the conversions are not perfect, the graphics will still fulfil the
customer's requirement. Simple stuff such as try not to use any text in a
picture, and if you have to use some, keep it a reasonable distance from
other objects so that if it moves a millimetre or so, it doesn't matter.
And stick to RGB colour

Cheers

Wow! Thanks for all the replies everyone!

OK, so I guess I should have let you know that the ultimate ways that these
will be used will be on PC's running Word 2003 or Word 2007. We do have a
token PC here that has Word 2003 on it, and I had been trying that as well for
the importing.

We have Illustrator CS3 on the Mac for creating graphics. But I see limited
results from the exporting here.

I have Word v.X on my machine, but someone here may have Word 2008. I just
worry about compatibility with the PCs using Word 2003 & 2007.

And my last effort was trying a free trial of Corel Draw to create the
graphics. It can open the Illustrator files, and then export a lot of
different formats, probably better optimized for a PC I would imagine. This is
how I was able to generate an EPS w/ a WMF preview. Illustrator does not offer
this, even the PC version.

But I'll also try an EMF created by Corel. The EMF created by Illustrator
looked HORRIBLE, but maybe that was more due to how it was imported.

This is WAY more complicated than it needs to be!!!

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[mdh]

Wow! Thanks for all the replies everyone!

OK, so I guess I should have let you know that the ultimate ways that these will be used will be on PC's running Word 2003 or Word 2007. We do have a token PC here that has Word 2003 on it, and I had been trying that as well for the importing.

We have Illustrator CS3 on the Mac for creating graphics. But I see limited results from the exporting here.

Based on your setup, I'd suggest:
Draw your image at 2x its size in Illustrator (*)
Export as WMF
Import into Word 2003 or 2007 under windows
Rescale to 50% using in Word's "Format Picture" dialog box

(*) you might want to try drawing at 1x, then rescaling to 2x in
Illustrator just before exporting. You can try other scaling factors
to improve your end result, at the cost of increased image size.

I personally love PDF and EPS workflows, but they don't work well in
an environment with MS Office, random printer drivers, etc.

Matt

 

[Kenny]

Thanks for the tips.

Well, after trying WAY too many options, what seems to work the most consistently for our client (in a PC Word 2003 & 2007 environment, with both postscript and non-postscript printers) was:

- EPS w/ WMF header created from Corel Draw

This printed perfectly to their postscript printer, and 'decently' to their non-postscript printers. And it made decent PDFs as well from Word, which they do a lot.

It's strange how many problems we had with so many options, and we are bummed we had to rely on Corel (a trial versions) to do it. That will be tricky if we need to update. But none of Illustrator's exporting seemed to work very well.

Thanks for all the tips though. Graphic Designers LOVE Microsoft!!!

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Kenny:

Yes, EPS with a WMF header has been a preferred format for me for many
years, for precisely the reasons you explain.

However, you could also point out to the client that almost EVERY printer
you are likely to find in an office these days can handle PostScript, but
they may have to speak firmly to their IT Department to get the PostScript
drivers loaded Some of the cheaper ones do not have a PostScript
interpreter on-board, they rely on a rasteriser in the driver.

Whenever I strike the problem at a client, I complain loudly to the IT Dept,
and magically the PostScript Drivers appear on the network in a couple of
days

I guess when companies outsource their IT Support and pay peanuts, there is
a risk they will get monkeys

Cheers

Thanks for the tips.

Well, after trying WAY too many options, what seems to work the most
consistently for our client (in a PC Word 2003 & 2007 environment, with both
postscript and non-postscript printers) was:

- EPS w/ WMF header created from Corel Draw

This printed perfectly to their postscript printer, and 'decently' to their
non-postscript printers. And it made decent PDFs as well from Word, which they
do a lot.

It's strange how many problems we had with so many options, and we are bummed
we had to rely on Corel (a trial versions) to do it. That will be tricky if we
need to update. But none of Illustrator's exporting seemed to work very well.

Thanks for all the tips though. Graphic Designers LOVE Microsoft!!!

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]